Consumer Watchdog and the Center for Digital Democracy say the merger would be anti-competitive and raise all kinds of privacy red flags. CDD Executive Director Jeff Chester predicts consummation of the deal would lead to "higher prices, less innovation and fewer choices."

The FTC already has stepped up its scrutiny. Google announced last week that the FTC has made a "second request" for additional information about the AdMob deal, a sign federal regulators are intent on examining all aspects of the proposed acquisition in some detail, says Chester.

AdMob's technologies can track and analyze mobile device users' behavior, ethnicity, age, gender, education -- and location. Google, meanwhile, is capable of correlating everything you do on every Web site you reach through it's dominant search service -- even more so since it's $3.1 billion dollar acquisition of online display advertising giant DoubleClick in 2007.

But those same complaints appear to be falling on friendlier ears this time around. Current FTC chairman Jon Leibowitz has advocated moving beyond the venerable Sherman Antitrust Act and using powers set forth in the FTC Act to stop anticompetitive practices. A member of the commission since 2004, Leibowitz was the only voice of dissent in a 2007 FTC report blaming skyrocketing gasoline prices solely on market forces. He suggested profiteering at the expense of consumers may have been a factor.

Meanwhile, Google is finding regulatory blessings for its business practices harder to come since its big DoubleClick win. A threat by the Department of Justice to block Google's proposed advertising partnership with Yahoo prompted the search giant to put a Yahoo alliance on ice. And the FTC's probe of the ties between the boards of Google and Apple precipitated Eric E. Schmidt, Google's chairman and chief executive, to resign from the Apple board, and Arthur Levinson, a member of the board of directors of both companies to resign from Google's board.

Chester says he finds it encouraging that since the Google-DoubleClick merger federal regulators have begun examining competition and privacy questions as separate, but related matters. "Google is now in regulators' cross hairs," he says.

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